Double Discrimination: Is Discrimination in Job Ads Accompanied by Discrimination in Callbacks?

Audit studies have found employment discrimination in a variety of contexts. In Mexico, an overlooked aspect of this discrimination is that job advertisements usually include explicit criteria of gender, age, attractiveness, or require a photograph in the resume. These specifications, which we refer to as “explicit discrimination,” may affect which applicants receive responses. We pose two hypotheses. First, a reduction in matching costs may result in a higher callback rate from explicitly discriminating employers. Second, discrimination in the first stage of the hiring process could lead to other discrimination patterns in later stages. We test for such biases using a correspondence experiment, in which fictitious resumes with randomized applicant information were sent in response to job advertisements in Mexico City. Consistent with our first hypothesis, employers with explicitly discriminatory ads are 7.6 percentage points more likely to call at least one female candidate for an interview than those without explicit discrimination. With respect to our second hypothesis, the probability of a callback is close to 18 percentage points lower for married women responding to ads specifically targeted to women than for those responding to non-gendered ads. With respect to race, we find that only ads that include two or more discriminatory criteria resulted in a higher callback probability for white or mestizo women than for indigenous women or women with no photograph in their resumes. We find no economically significant results for men. Thus, although there is a higher callback rate from discriminatory ads, there is also exacerbated discriminatory behavior from employers, producing for some groups a type of double discrimination in the hiring process.